The problem ... after all, was not what our enemies did, but what
our friends did. --HANNAH ARENDT

From the outset, the Nazi government used legislation, administrative
decrees, and propaganda to defame and ostracize Jews and to lower their
social, economic, and legal standing. The April boycott of 1933 attempted to
expose German Jews to public opprobrium and to destroy Jewish businesses, and
the laws of that month limited Jewish participation in the economy. In
September 1935, the Nuremberg Laws formally deprived Jews of their rights as
citizens and established racial segregation. It took less than two years to
destroy the foundations upon which Jewish life had existed in Germany since
the country's unification in 1871.

Jewish women shared the predicament of Jewish men: economic decline,
social ostracism, and the loss of trust in their children's economic and
social futures. Jewish women also shared the reactions of Jewish men: disbelief,
outrage, and fear. Still, their experiences were gendered. In their public
tirades and actions, the Nazis focused on Jewish males. Moreover, at first
they spared Jewish women physical abuse. Therefore, women took on new
roles--interceding for their men with the police, the tax offices, and the
landlord--while continuing older patterns of mediating for their families in
the neighborhood, at the grocery, or in the schools. They took their cues and
considered their alternatives from their vantage point as Jews and as women.

POLITICAL LAWLESSNESS AND ECONOMIC OPPRESSION

The Nazis celebrated January 30, 1933, with torchlight parades and what
they called the "restoration of law and order"--instantaneous and cruel
assaults on their political opponents. Hitler's SA broke up socialist and
communist headquarters--arresting, imprisoning, torturing, and murdering
members of these parties and labor unionists. The violence worsened after
February 28 when Hitler, using the Reichstag fire as a pretext, abolished
basic civil liberties, raised penalties for many crimes from imprisonment
to death, and increased the powers of the central government over those
of the states. Almost 10,000 communists were arrested and incarcerated
in rapidly built concentration camps. The infamous "Enabling Act," officially
labeled the "Law for the Relief of the Distress of Nation and State,"
sanctioned Hitler's assumption of dictatorial power. By March 23, legality had
given way to "national will" as represented by Hitler and the Nazi Party.

The Nazis did not immediately single out Jews for attack, busy as they were
coordinating the states with the central regime, abolishing all other political parties,
and destroying the trade unions. Still, Jews could not always escape violence.
And, when a communist, socialist, or pacifist happened also to be Jewish, he or
she had far more to fear than a non-Jewish political colleague. Jews were treated
even more ruthlessly. Because of their double risk, some Jews fled Germany
immediately. The Nazis often "taught a lesson" to those who remained. For
example, right after the election of 1933, a Jewish father and daughter were
arrested as suspected leftists. The young woman had taken photos of socialist and
Nazi demonstrations and of working-class children at play. Officials confiscated
her camera and jailed her. She recounted: "The women were put in the same room
as female criminals. They were not beaten, they could read books and write letters,
but they heard the screams of men being tortured." After three weeks both she and
her father were freed. The father had been tortured to such an extent that the
cleaners asked if the man whose suit they were cleaning had been hit by a car.

Politically affiliated or even politically interested Jews realized immediately
the severity of the Nazi threat. They feared house searches and the possibility
that the Gestapo (the Secret State Police) would find--or plant--evidence that
would incriminate them. While the Nazis burned books in public, many Jews
burned portions of their libraries and their papers in private. In Berlin, the Jewish
wife of a non-Jewish political prisoner arrested for "anti-Nazi" behavior was
terrified of every move she made. She had been active in the cooperative
movement, in tenants' leagues, and, since 1932, in anti-Nazi activities.
Although she "looked Aryan" and therefore met few antisemitic threats on the
street, she adjusted to using only public phone booths, fearing that her own
phone was tapped, and burned her "compromising documents." Journalist Inge
Deutschkron also described how her mother insisted on burning the leftist
material in their library: "Every time my mother consigned another pamphlet
to the scrap heap, Father would protest mildly. `Are you sure?' he'd ask,
and Mother, who'd always been the more practical of the two and had
developed a nose for danger, would respond almost gruffly."

Fear of house searches caused one couple to spend many evenings looking
through books and letters to rid themselves of:

everything which could be interpreted as doubtful.... I ... fed to the
flames many papers which might have been of interest to children and
grandchildren; for example, excerpts of various newspapers and
periodicals, ... papers of the "World Peace Association of Women and
Mothers." ... The Minister of Culture for Bavaria had stated: "Every
pacifist deserves to be whipped out of the country."

The Nazis were brutal toward politically affiliated women, both Jewish and
non-Jewish, and a number of female Reichstag deputies and female state
parliamentarians suffered beatings and death at their hands. Of the
five most prominent Jewish women in politics--all members of socialist
parties--everyone escaped. Four left the country immediately, presuming that their
politics would bring the wrath of the Nazis down on them. The fifth left in 1938
after her mother had died.

Jews jailed as communists--whether the charge was true or false--had
the most to dread. They were accused of "preparing for high treason."
Recha Rothschild, a member of the Communist Party, quickly destroyed
her files in February 1933. She fled her apartment, returning to it (at the
end of March) after the SA had stormed in, stolen her belongings, and
shredded all of her books and papers. She hid but was caught and charged with
being a courier for the Communist Party, even though there was no hard evidence
against her. The Reich court declared the evidence too
flimsy, but the Prussian court, under Nazi control, sentenced Rothschild to two
years in prison. There, among political prisoners, criminals, and prostitutes,
her health deteriorated dangerously. Spitting up blood, she still refused "to
drop dead for the Nazis." The Nazis treated Jewish women caught in the act of
resistance even more brutally. Kathe Baronowitz was an active communist who
led a cell of ten people. Her landlord, who was in the
SA, spied on her, and in 1936 she and eighty-three other communists were
arrested. First, she was tortured: "The cruelties and perversities of the
interrogation can hardly be described. [She] had to undress completely. A howling
pack goaded on by alcohol surrounded her. They stuck pens in her vagina and
paper flags which they burned so that they could gloat over the tortured woman's
screams of pain." They called her "Jew whore" as they tormented her. Ultimately,
she was sentenced to twelve years of hard labor.

As was the case for non-Jews, the Nazis frequently took Jewish wives hostage
in order to force politically active husbands who had fled or hidden--often at the
urging of their wives--to give themselves up. Also, the police or Gestapo
interrogated wives or mothers about the whereabouts of men. Sometimes these
women suffered punishment for their sons' or husbands' escapes. After Isaak Plaut
fled the small town of Rauschenberg in 1935, the police arrested his wife, Therese.
Luckily she and the mayor had been classmates. She called him from jail and asked,
"Aren't you ashamed to leave me sitting here?" He freed her, and she left Germany
in early 1936. Early Nazi terror was capricious. Although Therese Plaut managed
to turn to an old friend, most women hostages had no such recourse. At the end of
1935, 75 percent of all women in the Hohenstein jail, one of six women's penal
institutions, were hostages for their male relatives. Hostages' memoirs give a sense
of the extraordinary violence that started even in the very first weeks of the
regime. When the Jewish wife of a Leipzig Jewish communist was arrested as a
hostage after he had fled for his life, their five-year-old son--atypically--was also
imprisoned with his mother. Fearful, he refused to separate from her, hugging her
tightly when the guard came to take her for interrogation. The guard tore him away
from his mother, throwing him backward brutally. He died when his head hit the
metal edge of a prison bed.

More frequently than official arrest, Jewish families confronted sudden
lawlessness: "Naked brutality, breach of law, the most dreadful hypocrisy,
unmitigated barbarism pose[d] as law." The law also became a source of
persecution. As bourgeois champions of the Rechtsstaat, or rule of law, which had
bolstered Jewish claims to equal citizenship in the nineteenth century, German
Jews found the perversion of law difficult to bear. And individual Germans took
advantage of the legal defenselessness of Jews. A Jewish woman, living in
Nuremberg, reported: "The most frightening fact at this moment was being
deprived of the protection of the law. Anybody could accuse you of anything--and
you were lost." The worst was reserved for Jewish men. One woman described
how her husband had been badly beaten by one of his tenants. When he asked the
police for support (something some Jews still tried to do in 1933), they refused.
Another man was arrested because a neighbor complained of his behavior toward her
dog. Leaving a note explaining that he "could no longer stand the unjust and
defenseless life of a Jew in Germany," he killed himself in prison.

In general, Jews navigated increasingly menacing public spaces. Even a trip to
the post office could have dire consequences. After Hilde Sichel muttered about
the unreliability of the post, a postal clerk threatened to denounce her: "Every
evening I thought about the day that just passed and asked myself if I had done
or said anything that could endanger my husband or myself." Jews even feared
being the recipients of occasional grumbling by non-Jews. Lily Krug described her
reaction when an "Aryan" neighbor complained to her about the price of butter in
front of others: "I did not answer and hurried away without buying anything. I
was frightened. Fear, fear, fear--morning, noon and night. Fear followed us into our
dreams, racking on nerves. How imprudent, how inconsiderate of the woman to
speak like that in public."

For Jews, daily fear was accompanied by economic strangulation. Long before
forced "Aryanization"--the complete takeover of Jewish assets--occurred, families
began to lose their businesses, could no longer pay for their properties, and were
often subjected to extortion. Although some larger Jewish business and
manufacturing establishments maintained their economic position somewhat
longer, as did Jews in certain sectors of the economy (such as the fur trade), small
"mom-and-pop shops" ("Tante Emma" Laden) declined precipitously. Many
individuals of "Aryan" ancestry benefited from the demise of Jewish businesses,
purchasing them at greatly reduced prices.

Governments, courts, and storm troopers urged customers and clients of Jews
to do business elsewhere. Almost immediately the SA began a series of economic
boycotts against Jewish shops and professionals. Boycotts created a climate of
fear that affected Jews and non-Jews, intimidating the latter and frightening and
hurting the former. On April 1, 1933, "on one of the best business days of the
year, on the Saturday before Easter," the regime declared a national boycott of
Jewish businesses. In announcing this first national boycott, Hitler called it a
"defensive measure" against anti-Nazi propaganda abroad for which he blamed the
Jews. The boycott generally lacked public enthusiasm. It was uneven, with little
support displayed in Berlin but excesses, including injury to and even murder of
Jews, reported elsewhere. SA and Nazi Party circles were joyful, but apathy,
even resistance, was widespread. While SA men stood in front of businesses
owned by Jews, threatening and taunting those who dared to enter, some Germans
chose precisely that day to visit a Jewish doctor or grocer. Moreover, the stock
market fell, in part because many Jewish stores were in foreign creditors' or
German banking hands. And, the boycott once again raised a vexing question: Who,
after all, was a Jew? These problems forced cancellation of the boycott on the
same day it had begun. Still, the Nazis claimed "success" despite their own
disappointment at "Aryan" responses. To some extent, their claims were right.
The boycott had taken a large toll among Jews in fear and intimidation.

Since the boycott was the first major public event turned specifically against
them, many Jews left memoirs describing that day. A few shut their businesses to
avoid trouble, but most remained open deliberately. Some commented on the
loyalty of their customers during this first, early test. One man recalled that his
small department store in Hanau did far more business the week before the
boycott than it had in years. His customers stocked up in case the boycott
dragged on, declaring their solidarity with his family. In Dortmund, observers
noted the disgust with which many Germans approached the boycott and the
courage with which they entered Jewish stores while the SA hurled insults and
abuse their way.

Jews also described their own resistance. Some resisted silently, as in the case
of World War I veterans who stood in front of their own stores wearing their
uniforms and medals. Others resisted verbally. When a young ruffian, determined
to cause damage, aggressively barged into Dr. Herta Nathorff's office shouting, "Is
this a Jewish enterprise?" she responded: "This is not an enterprise at all, these are
doctor's office hours .... Are you sick?" With that, the boy left. Nathorff made a
point of buying in stores owned by Jewish people on that day and told the SA
sentry, "For my money, I'll buy where I want!" Erna Albersheim, who had been
born "half Jewish" in New York and had married a German-Jewish man, displayed
great personal courage in confronting Nazis in Frankfurt, where the boycott was
relatively effective. When the Nazis picketed her store, she confronted them as an
"American" and told them to leave. They did. "I walked into my store with head
erect, but I was glad that no one could see my knees--they had the firmness of
jello." In Stettin, Olga Eisenstadt tried education rather than confrontation. She
stood outside her small shop arguing her personal case to passersby, in the hope
that they might generalize to other Jews:

I pointed out that I was a soldier's widow, that I had received the
Emperor's Service Cross in the First World War and the Cross of Honor
for soldiers' widows from Hindenburg.... I had also received a diploma
from ... Stettin in recognition of my social work during the ... war. I had
taught hundreds of soldiers' wives and widows [how] to make supplies for
the army.

As measured by Nazi expectations, the official boycott day failed. Jewish
businesses were given a brief--official--lease on life because the precarious German
economy could not then stand further destabilizing measures. Moreover, Jewish
big businesses remained relatively intact, since they employed many "Aryans" and
their failure could hurt the overall economy.

Unofficial boycotts, however, whether spontaneous or instigated by local
officials, persisted. Many Germans who had been angered or embarrassed by the
boycott on April 1 and had shown courage on that day tended to retreat into
privacy thereafter. They gradually submitted to the pressures of the "racial
community," remaining silent rather than defending Jews. In rural areas, for
example, Jewish dealerships of cattle, horses, and grain declined as a result of long-term
boycotts. Although at first some peasants remained loyal to business
relationships that had occasionally spanned generations, arguing that they got good
prices and products from Jewish dealers, they gradually succumbed to pressure.
Also, the Nazis disrupted long-term working relationships in the countryside
between Jews and non-Jews. Jewish cattle dealers often had to fire their non-Jewish
helpers in order to protect them from abuse. But in the cities, too,
customers who were loyal at first began to dwindle as the government increased its
attack on Jewish businesses.

Boycotts were only one among many strategies used by the government and
mercenary individuals to attack Jews in the economy. Jews were physically
brutalized by the regime: in Breslau, for example, the SA beat up Jewish jurists,
chasing them from their offices. The Nazis also pressured Jews to liquidate their
businesses or sell out to "Aryans." Restrictions and official and unofficial
harassment increased in frequency and fervor. As a result, many Jewish
businesses, particularly small ones, were forced to shut down or sell out. Alice
Baerwald, who lived in Danzig in the early 1930s, described how the Nazis ruined
the livelihoods of Jewish families. She wrote about a couple who had built up a
large clientele as hairdressers to support themselves and two children. After the
Nazi takeover, a German asked to buy the store for a ludicrously low price.
Surprised, they turned him down. Soon thereafter, local authorities accused the
couple of tax evasion, arrested the man, and confiscated their valuable equipment.
The family suffered ruin within a few days. Another couple owned a small
drugstore, which they put up for sale when the wife suddenly went blind. An
interested buyer exploited the situation by accusing the couple of tax
evasion. The husband was arrested and forced to sell for a pittance. The
government arrested another head of household for allegedly transferring
money abroad, although it was clear that he had legally purchased a delivery
car abroad. His business and home furnishings were confiscated. A
variety of "Aryans" used the beleaguered position of Jews to their own
financial advantage. One cattle dealer recalled: "Blackmail occurred every
day. Debtors demanded receipts for bills that they never paid. There was no
point in bringing legal action against them in court." Tenants could refuse
to pay rent with impunity, and in some cases they accused the landlord of
being an "enemy of the state" in order to be temporarily freed of their
obligations. By 1936, many areas of small business, particularly those associated
with agriculture, were declared judenrein, "free of Jews."

Jewish businesses in which non-Jews held significant shares were relatively
safe at first. Some Jewish owners could continue their businesses if they found an
"Aryan" partner. But this was a short-term solution at best. Ultimately, Jews had
to sell out to their "Aryan" partners, and Jews whose "Aryan" partners had died
or disassociated themselves had to give up their businesses. For example, a Jewish
woman, no longer protected by her deceased husband's "Aryan" status, had to
give up her business at the weekly market in 1939. She became a cleaning woman.
Of the approximately 50,000 Jewish small businesses operating at the end of
1932, only 9,000 still existed by July 1938. The bulk had faded to attract
"Aryanizers" and had simply collapsed. By November 1938, no more than 20 to
25 percent of all Jewish businesses remained.

While some Jews lost businesses, others lost their jobs or realized the futility
of finding jobs as a result of laws passed in April 1933. Feigning strict legality, the
Nazis passed the "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service" and
others like it. The Nazis used these "laws" to exclude opponents of the regime and
"non-Aryans," defined as people who had one "non-Aryan" parent or grandparent.
The so-called Aryan Paragraph of the April laws forced the dismissal
or early retirement of Jewish doctors, lawyers, judges, and civil servants (along
with political "undesirables"), with the exception, insisted upon by the aging
President Hindenburg, of those who had fought in World War I or had been in
their jobs before August 1914. About half of Jewish judges and prosecutors and
almost a third of Jewish lawyers lost their jobs. A significant proportion of
Jewish doctors lost their German National Health Insurance affiliation (severely
limiting or ruining their practices). Since the civil service in Germany encompassed
far more jobs than, for example, in the United States, the April laws meant that
even lower-status jobs such as civil service messengers, city street cleaners,
and train, postal, or Reichsbank employees had to be filled by "Aryans." A
further set of decrees put a quota on Jewish students in schools and universities.
These decrees affected up to 867,000 people, Jews as well as other "non-Aryan"
Christian Germans.

Hereafter, the jobs of millions of Germans--Jews, "Aryans," and those caught in
the middle--depended on the Nazi definition of their racial status. A scramble for
proof of "Aryan" lineage ensued. The journalist Bella Fromm noted in her diary
that "genealogists are doing a grand business. There are advertisements ...
daily....`We provide you with every kind of document and evidence.'" They
located birth, parish, or synagogue records, acquired declarations from Vital
Statistics Offices, or unearthed old family trees.

The field of teaching illustrates the changes that occurred. In 1933 in Prussia, 1
percent of male teachers and 4.5 percent of female teachers were discharged (at
least two-thirds of the women who were fired were "non-Aryan," as were almost
all the women student teachers who were fired). In early April 1933, Hanna
Bergas entered the school in which she taught for the last time:

When I arrived at the school building,... the principal, saying "Good
morning" in his customary, friendly way, stopped me, and asked me to
come to his room .... When we were seated, he said, in a serious,
embarrassed tone of voice, he had orders to ask me not to go into my
classroom. I probably knew, he said, that I was not permitted to teach
anymore at a German school. I did know, but was it to happen so
abruptly? ... Mr. B. was extremely sorry... I collected myself [and] my
belongings .... There was nobody ... to say goodbye to, because
everybody else had gone to the classroom .... In the afternoon ...
colleagues, pupils, their mothers came, some in a sad mood, others angry
with their country, lovely bouquets of flowers, large and small, in their
arms. In the evening, the little house was full of fragrance and colors,
like for a funeral, I thought; and indeed, this was the funeral of my time
teaching at a German public school.

Bergas's pain at losing her position reflected the loss not only of a job but also of
a community and profession. Like Jewish men, professional women suffered
economic adversity and the anguish of seeing their social status diminished and
their professional reputation rendered meaningless.

Dismissing Jewish teachers conveniently allowed the government to find
teaching assignments for 60 percent of 1,320 "Aryan" job applicants in 1933.
Here were opportunities for the unemployed and upward mobility during
the Great Depression. Similarly, the dismissal of Jews in the Prussian
administration affected between 12.5 and 15 percent of positions, and in other
states between 4.5 and 5 percent. There seems to have been little public complaint--and
silent endorsement--about the ousting of Jews. When the Nazis purged the
courts, even as staunch an anti-Nazi as Thomas Mann approved. Married to a
Jewish woman, he nevertheless confided to his diary: "It is no great misfortune ...
that ... the Jewish presence in the judiciary has been ended," although he worried
about his "secret, troubling" thoughts regarding the Jews. He evinced satisfaction
when Alfred Kerr, a well-known Berlin critic who had often attacked Mann's
work, lost his position. Selfish motives played an important role with Mann as
with others. In Hamburg, Lotte Popper's friendly non-Jewish neighbor told her
that her daughter had chosen one of two suitors, the assistant judge: "`Now he has
the best prospects ... in court, where they are firing so many ... people.' Mrs.
Hansen stifled the word `Jews' and ... expounded at great length upon her
daughter's happy future."

Non-Jewish doctors, too, profited from the removal of Jewish doctors,
accepting positions that had "become free" and patients who no longer patronized
Jewish doctors. In June 1933, there were about 5,500 Jewish doctors in Germany,
or 11 percent of all physicians (although the percentage is higher if one includes all
"non-Aryan," that is, partly Jewish, doctors). They were concentrated in large
cities, where most Jews lived. The early 1930s had seen vicious competition
among doctors, resulting from the depression and from the increasing numbers of
doctors who either belonged to or wanted to join the National Health Insurance
organizations. While some doctors demanded the removal of their Jewish
colleagues from the National Health Insurance, others pushed for their total ruin.
Dr. Henriette Necheles-Magnus described the crude tactics of a non-Jewish doctor
who was so eager to absorb her practice that he told her patients she had killed
herself.

In June 1933, about 13 percent of women doctors were Jewish, with the
proportion much higher in big cities. A few weeks after the German Doctors'
League (Verband der Arzte Deutschlands) expelled Jews, the League of German
Women Doctors (Deutscher Arztinnenbund) ousted its Jewish members. Herta
Nathorff described this exclusion in her diary:

April 16, 1933: Meeting of the League of German Women Doctors. As
usual, I went today, after all this is where the most respected and best
known women colleagues in Berlin gather. "Strange atmosphere today, I
thought, and so many strange faces." A colleague whom I did not know
said to me, "You must also be one of us?" and showed me the swastika
on the lapel of her coat. Before I could answer, she stood up and fetched
a gentleman into our meeting, who said that he had to demand the
Gleichschaltung [the Nazi takeover or Nazification] of the League in
the name of the government.... Another colleague ... my predecessor in
the Red Cross ... who had been dismissed ... because of unfitness and
other not very nice human qualities ... stood up and said, "Now I ask the
German colleagues to go into the next room for a discussion." Colleague
S., a good Catholic, ... asked: "What does that mean--German
colleagues?" "All who are not Jews, of course," was the answer. Now it
had been said. Silently, we "Jewish and half-Jewish" doctors stood up and
with us some "German" doctors--silently we left the room--pale, outraged
to our innermost selves. We then went ... to discuss what we should do
now. "We should quit the League as a united group," some said. I was
opposed. I will gladly allow them the honor of throwing us out, but I will
at least not voluntarily abandon my claim to membership.... I am so
agitated, so sad and confused, and I am ashamed for my "German"
colleagues!

Either on their own or because of government pressure, patients, too, turned away
from Jewish doctors. The National Health Insurance organizations scolded and
later threatened them for continuing to go to Jewish doctors (and this was only to
those remaining Jewish doctors who had not been dropped from the insurance
system in April 1933). Moreover, racial enthusiasts accused patients who
continued to go to Jewish doctors of being traitors to the Volk.

Late to enter what Germans called the "free" professions--notably medicine and
law--Jewish women suffered severe job losses. Whereas some Jewish men could
claim exceptional status as veterans or because they had been in their jobs since
before 1914, Jewish women could hardly profess to have fought at the front.
Furthermore, because of the late admission of women to German universities,
most female Jewish professionals had taken their positions only after 1914. The
result in the medical field was that the vast majority of Jewish women doctors lost
their health insurance affiliation, compared with about 40 percent of Jewish males.
In a letter about her sister's loss of most of her medical practice, Betty Scholem
concluded that Jews "are being destroyed in this bloodless way just as certainly as
if their necks had been wrung."

In September 1933, Goebbels took over the Chamber of Culture and excluded
Jews from German cultural life, film, theater, music, fine arts, literature,
and journalism--areas in which Jews had been disproportionately active.
Simultaneously, many private businesses and state licensing boards demanded that
their employees be "Aryans."

Unemployment began to plague the Jewish community. In 1933, about two-thirds
of Jewish salaried employees worked in Jewish businesses and firms. With
the disappearance of many Jewish firms, joblessness soared. By the spring of
1933, nearly one-third of Jewish clerks--compared with one-fifth of the non-Jewish
ones--were looking for jobs. In Berlin alone, where the general unemployment rate
hovered at 16 percent, more than a third of Jewish salaried employees and half of
Jewish workers were jobless. Even as the German economy improved, with
unemployment dropping from 6 million in January 1933 to 2.5 million in January
1936, Jews took no part in the general recovery.

Because more than half (53 percent) of employed Jewish women worked in
business and commerce, largely as family assistants (22 percent) and salaried
employees (40 percent), they lost their jobs as family businesses and Jewish
shops closed down. Jewish sources estimated that three-quarters of Jewish
women in business and trade were hurt by the discriminatory laws and the early
anti-Jewish boycotts. Jewish Employment Bureau statistics for 1934 and 1936
show that, although women seemed to find employment more readily than men
(except in the free professions), only a minority of job seekers of either sex
actually found placements. By April 1938, over 60 percent of all businesses that
Jews had owned before 1933 no longer existed, and Jewish social workers were
trying to help 60,000 unemployed Jews. Furthermore, those businesses that
lingered on tended to be either at the very top (a few banks and financial
institutions) or the bottom (independent artisans). Women rarely worked in
either.

Despite limited job options, many Jewish women who had never worked
outside the home suddenly needed employment. While some sought jobs with
strangers, others began to work for their husbands who could no longer afford to
pay employees. The hope was that "work for married women [was] only ... an
expedient in an emergency." By proclaiming the crisis nature of women's new
position, Jews, both male and female, could dream of better times and ignore the
even more unsettling issue of changing gender roles in the midst of turmoil.
Contrary to their hopes, by 1938 there were "relatively few families in which the
wife [did] not work in some way to earn a living." Finding a job under new and
hostile circumstances, particularly for women who had never worked outside the
home, could be deeply demoralizing. Women had to assess their abilities in midlife--often
with little more than a typical girl's education and no marketable skills. Job
ads, employment offices, friends, and acquaintances held out little hope.

Still, in spite of discouragement, both memoirs and statistics show that women
eagerly sought opportunities either to train for a job for the first time or, in many
cases, to retrain for new jobs. Some prepared for new work in Germany, many for
jobs they hoped to fill abroad. Ruth Abraham took a speed course in becoming a
corsetiere while on a three-month visit to her sister in Palestine. Although Jews
could no longer be licensed by the time she returned to Germany, she quickly
developed a private circle of customers. Some women prepared for several jobs
and studied several different languages at once, assuming that they needed to be
versatile should they emigrate. One woman studied English and took lessons in
sewing furs, making chocolate, and doing industrial ironing. A mother and her
daughter took courses in Spanish, English, baking, and fine cookery. Then they
asked their laundress to accept them as apprentices. This role was not only new
for them but was also a reversal of their previous class position.

Whereas most women understood their behavior within the context of an
emergency, some may have taken advantage of dire circumstances to fulfill
ambitions that would have languished in better times. One woman not only took
cooking classes because she would soon need to handle the household herself but
also began training as a psychotherapist to support her family when they
emigrated. She had to leave her husband and children for an entire year in order to
study at Jung's institute in Zurich. In normal times, she probably would have
remained simply a doctor's wife.

The Jewish communities in various towns and cities also offered courses in
which women eagerly enrolled. In Hamburg, such courses included cooking and
baking, sewing and tailoring, hat making, glove making, artificial flower arranging,
and smocking. Communities also offered typing, shorthand, bookkeeping,
photography, and languages classes. By 1935, Jewish organizations needed more
home economics teachers. While many financed their training (and, in many cases,
retraining) themselves, the Jewish community's Central Bureau for Economic
Relief supported the instruction of 20,000 men and women until the end of 1937.
Moreover, by 1938 there were ninety-four retraining collectives for agriculture,
handicraft, home economics, and nursing. Zionist organizations played a large role
in these collectives through their Hachsharah centers, which taught practical skills
needed in Palestine. About 23,000 young people--about one-third of them females--learned
how to raise chickens or to work as locksmiths, tailors, or baby nurses.
Ultimately, by 1941, 17,000 Jews readied in these centers entered Palestine under
its quota for "workers."

According to Jewish observers, women seemed "more accommodating and
adaptable" and had "fewer inhibitions" than men; were willing to enter retraining
programs at older ages than men; and were more amenable to changing their lives
to fit the times. The number of women who successfully retrained in these years
was almost evenly distributed between the ages of twenty and fifty, whereas men
most frequently retrained between the ages of twenty and thirty, and usually
stopped seeking retraining by forty. Leaders of the Berlin Jewish Community
noted that retraining for women was less costly and took less time than for men
(three to six months for women, compared with about one year for men).
Presumably, women were taught less skilled jobs than men. Also, although most
had worked as sales clerks or office help, they already knew many of the skills
necessary for jobs as seamstresses, milliners, or domestic workers.

Younger women under age thirty-five were the most likely to still find work.
They took jobs in Jewish concerns as other Jews began to emigrate. Also, the
demand for help picked up in the expanding Jewish social service sector and--after
the Nuremberg Laws--in Jewish households. In 1936, 52 percent of the female
applicants for commercial jobs in Berlin could be placed, compared with 22
percent of the male applicants. That same year the demand for Jewish female
household personnel in Berlin exceeded the
supply. There was a general shortage of female household helpers, particularly in
small towns, and an even more serious shortage of nurses in Jewish hospitals and
convalescent homes.

Job availability in some sectors notwithstanding, the employment and
economic prospects of all Jews was bleak. Whereas only 8 percent of Jews were
manual workers in 1933, 56 percent fell into that category by 1939. As
unemployment increased, so too did poverty. The highest percentages of needy
Jews were found in areas with the largest proportion of Eastern European Jewish
immigrants. In 1937 the Berlin Jewish Community supported fifteen soup
kitchens and provided used clothing for thousands of Jewish Berliners.

Legally, Jews had rights to public assistance until 1939. In practice, however,
the Nazis found ways of denying all forms of state and quasi-state benefits to
Jews. Although the total number of Jews receiving every form of public welfare
during the 1930s is not available, as early as the winter of 1935-36 the Jewish
Winter Relief Agency subsidized 20 percent of the Jewish population; another 20
to 25 percent were living off the capital they had received from the sale of their
businesses. In 1936, nearly 60,000 Berlin Jews received clothing from such
used-clothing storerooms. Men's suits, in particular, were in great demand,
whereas women's clothing, easier to repair by experienced housewives, could be
replaced more readily. Winter Relief Agency workers remarked that the social
descent of Jews could be seen "most clearly by their depleted clothing. To
remedy [this] means not only material, but also psychological relief."

As early as April 1933 (a few months before the founding of the Central
Organization of German Jews), leading Jewish organizations had founded
the Central Committee for Help and Construction (Zentralausschuss fur
Hilfe und Aufbau) to prepare for possible emergencies. The Central
Committee broadened the scope of social welfare work, joining the Central
Organization of German Jews in early 1935. The Central Organization spent
its budget for 1936 (of about 4.3 million marks) on migration and
emigration, economic aid, and welfare work. Its revenues came only in part
(1.6 million marks) from the German-Jewish community; grants from abroad
provided about 2.1 million marks, and the rest was pure deficit. Sadly, as
early as 1937 the Central Organization recognized that it could no longer
meet the requirements of its constituencies. It had received monetary
requests "from all regions ... because poverty had soared. All of these
petitions had to be turned down with a heavy heart."